The first teaser for HAPPYish, the new Showtime series starring Steve Coogan, was just OK. It introduced a middle-aged guy who is struggling to deal with his family and changing social structures around him and, maybe, not having such a great time with all of it. This new HAPPYish trailer is infinitely more entertaining. It indicates a lot more of the show’s moment to moment comedy, and reveals more variety in Coogan’s performance. This is the one to check out, and you can do so after the break. Read More »

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Here’s a teaser for the new Showtime comedy HAPPYish, which premieres in April. The show stars Steve Coogan as Thom Payne, a mid-40s guy who has to deal with a young new boss who throws around business buzzwords with alarming freedom. But the arrival of that guy in Payne’s life is just the catalyst for other questions, primary among which is whether or not Payne can ever actually be happy.

Also appearing in the half-hour show are Kathryn Hahn and Bradley Whitford, and guest stars including Ellen Barkin (who shows up in this HAPPYish trailer), Carrie Preston, Molly Price and Andre Royo. Read More »

This trailer for CBGB, which dramatizes the history of the NYC club that was the birthplace of new wave and punk in America, makes a lot of noise about the fact that the club’s bathroom (above) was famously gross. In fact, after the club closed, parts of that bathroom and other elements of the joint were actually disassembled and worked into the sets used for the movie.

And yet the footage itself looks like a squeaky clean recreation of the house where bands like Blondie, the Talking Heads and the Ramones built their careers.

Kids deserve to know about the roots of punk rock in the US, and there’s nothing really wrong with a bunch of people playing dress-up as the biggest figures of the NYC new wave and punk scene. But it’s pretty funny. Watch the footage below and you’ll see Alan Rickman as Hilly Kristal, who opened the iconic club in ’73, Donal Logue as his compatriot, and Malin Akerman, Rupert Grint, Ashley Greene, Johnny Galecki, Ryan Hurst, Justin Bartha and Bradley Whitford as members of Talking Heads, Blondie, The Ramones, Dead Boys, The Police, Iggy Pop and Patti Smith Group. Read More »

Poor Captain America never saw his lady love again, but we’re about to. As it turns out, even after her superpowered boyfriend plunged into the Arctic Ocean, Agent Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) kept fighting the good fight with the Strategic Scientific Reserve (SSR), the precursor to S.H.I.E.L.D.

Marvel’s new short Agent Carter picks up a year after the end of Captain America: The First Avenger, following the SSR analyst on her quest to find the mysterious “Zodiac.” In advance of the film’s premiere at Comic-Con, Marvel has revealed a new poster and a trio of images. Hit the jump to check ’em out.

There’s a certain kind of stress that comes with watching a favorite book get adapted into movies, and I can only imagine that the process must be even more nerve-wracking for the authors of those books. It can’t be easy for them to see their work chopped up and rearranged, or to find that what soars on the page drops with a thud on the screen.

In Saving Mr. Banks, writer P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) tries to save herself that grief by refusing to hand over the film rights to her Mary Poppins books. But Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) doesn’t give up easily, and, well, if you’ve ever tried to wrap your mouth around the nonsense word “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” you can probably guess how that goes. Watch the first trailer for the fact-based drama after the jump.

When Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho opened in 1960 it was carried into theaters on a wave of advertising that commanded audiences to keep mum about the story’s surprising elements. Thanks in part to that ad campaign, Psycho became a hit that changed horror films even as it legitimized them. The mainstream horror genre quickly developed around a codified set of tropes, character archetypes and specific rules that, fifty years later, are tiresome in their predictability.

Marketing for The Cabin in the Woods, from director Drew Goddard and his co-writer Joss Whedon, exploits some of that same “don’t tell friends how it ends!” PR mode. But that’s just a smokescreen. Goddard and Whedon aim to demolish the archetypes born in the wake of that early popularization of horror, and in doing so bring a sense of spontaneous fun back to the genre.

The pair succeeds spectacularly. The Cabin in the Woods is a blast. It’s a film for anyone who feels the spark has gone out of horror. This movie is clever and quite self-aware, and it has very specific ideas about what caused horror to fall into rote patterns. As they get around to explaining just how horror turned into what it is today, Goddard and Whedon give the audience a chum bucket full of the thrills it wants, but also argues that playing by the rules is the wrong way to go. Read More »

One of the films that got caught up in the tumultuous financial collapse at MGM was The Cabin in the Woods, which Joss Whedon co-wrote with Cloverfield writer Drew Goddard, who also directed. The film stars Chris Hemsworth (Thor) in a story that tweaks the classic horror plot setup that plops a handful of people into a cabin in the middle of nowhere.

When MGM’s financial standing temporarily went to the great balance sheet in the sky, the two biggest projects that were left standing like children in a Charles Dickens novel were the Red Dawn remake andThe Cabin in the Woods, a reportedly smart horror film directed by Cloverfield writer Drew Goddard and co-written and produced by Joss Whedon.

I’m not certain that anyone cares much about the still-homeless Red Dawn, especially after EnemyGate, but I’ve heard so many good things about The Cabin in the Woods from parties in the know that I am quite curious to see it. And now Lionsgate is going to make that happen, as the studio is picking up Cabin to distribute this year. Read More »

Annette Haywood-Carter, a former script supervisor who jumped to directing (Foxfire, with a young Angelina Jolie, for instance), is preparing to shoot the period drama Savannah in the Georgia town of the same name, and has secured the final pieces of the film’s cast. Jim Caviezel and Chiwetel Ejiofor have joined Bradley Whitford, Jaimie Alexander, Jack McBrayer and Hal Holbrook. Read More »